SAN JOSE — Now that I’ve simmered down a bit, I can see the point that Bloomberg Businessweek was trying to make by calling our own Alviso “the Ghost Town of Silicon Valley.”

The nickname came up in a short and fairly gentle video posted on the Bloomberg blog. It featured respected Silicon Valley reporter Ashlee Vance pointing out some of Alviso’s historic and dilapidated buildings while talking to an amateur historian about the district’s colorful past.

In the ready-fire-aim way of the Internet, I immediately posted a blog item that pointed out that Alviso is hardly the “forgotten town” the video’s lead-in describes. The North San Jose neighborhood is home to high-tech heavyweights IBM, Polycom, Flextronics, Boston Scientific and TiVo.

But here’s the thing: What’s great about Alviso is that even while it’s becoming a hotbed of high-tech campuses, it still retains a distinctive characteristic that is, well, hard to describe. Ghost town doesn’t quite do it for me. But is it quirky? Funky? Eclectic? Quaint? Colorful? Peaceful? Breezy? Dilapidated?

It’s all those things in addition to being a big business address. And that is its 21st-century charm.

“It’s bittersweet having them there,” Juan del Real Jr. says of Alviso’s tech company newcomers, “because they’re encroaching on that old-town feeling. At the same time, it helps keep it alive.”

Del Real is an Alviso expert. He grew up there. In 1996, when the Web was new and he was 25, he created a website extolling the beauty and history of Alviso. He wanted people to know his neighborhood for more than the garbage dump and sewage treatment plant that were there. He wanted them to know Alviso for more than a smell, is the way he put it at the time. Yes, Alviso has come a long way, but del Real says the lingering ghost-town aspects of Alviso are vital to the place that it is today.

“Once you go into the old part of town,” he says, “what they call the historic district, the abandoned buildings and the homes that are in arrested decay, it goes to that feeling that you are somewhere else, somewhere far away.”

And can’t anyone who lives and works in Silicon Valley understand the desire to sometimes want to be somewhere else; to get far away? That’s what drew Rudy Mueller to Alviso in the first place. Years ago, he was working through a particularly stressful time at a big tech firm not far from Alviso.

“It was just like this little respite where I’d go for lunch and just breathe,” says Mueller, a finance guy who moved to Utah last year.

It was an escape from Silicon Valley in Silicon Valley.

“It was kind of fun,” he says. “I’d just go up there and see the train and eat my lunch and look out at the vastness.”

In fact, the folks in San Jose’s economic development shop say prospective corporate tenants see Alviso’s quirky, ghost-townish side as more of a feature than a bug.

“They sort of talk about the amenities of having the Bay Trail and having all the baylands surrounding it,” says Chris Burton, who works in economic development. “Alviso is really a strong community and very unique in San Jose.”

No question, Alviso is different. Over the years, I’ve written about squatters living on barely floating boats in the Alviso Slough. I’ve written about sheep grazing along the chaotic traffic of Highway 237. I’ve written about Vahl’s, a restaurant frozen in time somewhere around 1952 (though it does now feature karaoke and accepts credit cards).

And there is something powerful about being confronted by the remnants of the past, like the decaying cannery featured in the Bloomberg video, or the leaning wooden sheds and buildings that were a vibrant part of the valley’s agricultural past and Alviso’s history as a port.

Silicon Valley is a place obsessed by what’s ahead. What’s past is past. But it is also a place susceptible to complacency. We are trendsetters and worldbeaters and sometimes it’s hard for some to see a scenario in which they are no longer on top.

Maybe, then, working among the ruins of the agricultural past in Alviso provides an advantage to the engineers who work every day at TiVo, IBM, Polycom, Flextronics and the other tech companies big and small that are moving in on what some might call Silicon Valley’s ghost town.

Otto Warmbier was arrested in January 2016 at the end of a brief tourist visit to North Korea. He had been medically evacuated and was being treated at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center when he died at age 22.